About Me

Heya!

My name is Natalie Webb, and I am the one running this circus.

Yep. That’s me. Or my alter ego Brent, if you want to get more specific.

No, that’s not right. “Running” would imply I have employees, but that is not the case. I do have help, though, mostly in the form of a big and burly, magnificently bearded, sexy husband named Tyler. He is much better with the heavy lifting than I.

Papa Bear

On the blog here, he is referred to as Papa Bear. This is in part because he gives really good hugs and says “Rawr” a lot.

The Bear

We officially got hitched on August 31st, 2012. You can check out out engagement session and wedding right below, if you like. All photography is by Bobbie of Roberta Rae Photography, who is amazing and everyone should hire her.

A Rainbow and Strawberry Field Engagement Session

Our Intimately Modern Pagan Full Moon Foodie Wedding Part 2

Our Intimately Modern Pagan Full Moon Foodie Wedding Part 1

Our Intimately Modern Pagan Full Moon Foodie Wedding Part 3

Baby Bear

Tyler has a 4-year-old daughter named Morgan, who I don’t even attempt to just call my step-kid anymore. Since the first time she lost her mind rocking out to Tom Waits in her car seat, even though I’m not actually her mom, she has been my kid.

She is too damn smart for her own good. She is a geyser of emotions and energy. She is obsessed with cleanliness and order, yet is constantly filthy. When she gets excited, her voice and vocal inflections are reminiscent of a boy going through puberty, crossed with the vocal stylings of a wet and angry cat surrounded by birds. She has a knack for bringing others under her spell.

If she was so inclined, she would make a great cult leader when she grows up. She is awesome.

So, since you’re on the About page here, I guess you would like to know a little something about me. Well, that makes me feel both warm and fuzzy, and like I want to hide in a hole, all at the same time.

So Yea…About Me Eh?

I am a formerly wanderlusty lady, landed back home in Chicago. I avoid tradition wherever possible, and now that I’m quickly creeping up on 30, a newlywed, and attempting to start a family, I’m trying my utmost not to freak out about it.

My resume is a mess.

On paper, it looks as if every couple of years I would just take off in another direction like a puppy after a squirrel and start a whole new life. Those people who have known me since before I escaped the confinement of high school accept the fact that every so often I drop off the face of the earth for a couple of years.

I have been:

…a maudlin art student and a sharpshooter-qualified soldier, a mad scientist barista and a psychiatric medical transcriptionist, a 19-year-old wife and a 21-year-old divorceé, a heavy-handed bartender and a corporate marketing monkey, a straight razor-wielding rockstar barber and a superstar waitress, a custom-knitting fiend and a psychotically meticulous data analyst, a babysitter to both children and multi-million dollar business owners, a step-mom to two rambunctious little boys who did not speak English, and now a step-mom to a little ball of crazy that seems to speak in tongues…

This totally happened

Just off the top of my head.

In the last 10 years.

So now that you know so much about the family and I, while we still know nothing about you (say hi, will ya?), I’ll bet you’re wondering how this blog came to be, and what the blog name is all about.

First, a little background.

Ze Background

I have always been a huge introvert, socially awkward, OCD, and bipolar. This has been the tiniest problem in my interaction with people.

Because interacting with people so often ends with public humiliation and awkwardness (even when it is only in my own head), I like to hermit up and project. “…leave me to my projects…” is what I mutter when people attempt to interrupt project time.

Knitting, crafts, DIY, making grand rainbow-color-coded charts, graphs and plans in Excel to quantify every aspect of my life – my projects were my escape from the world. My fantasy land.

And then came Pinterest. I spent days at a time on there, like a WoW-addicted gamer geek in his mom’s basement, carefully curating and organizing my life and everything that made me happy into perfectly categorized pinboards.

Pincrack

The worried little girl who made lists and read the entire encyclopedia at age 8 and loved Rainbow Brite and My Little Pony and unicorns had found a place to call home. A place that made sense. A place that worked the way I felt the world should.

It consumed my life.

My family started to treat me like they were planning a legit intervention.

So I started a blog. My reasoning was, if I could make a little money from blogging, I could justify to my family the hundreds (geez, thousands?) of hours I had “wasted” on Pinterest.

Then the blog consumed my life.

In the most amazing way possible.

How the Blog Started

While I still work my day job as a barber in Chicago while freelancing in copywriting and social media management, after only a couple of months, I decided to go pro and turn Leave Me to My Projects into my business.

The only problem was, how was I to turn this jumble of all of these things I loved into a business? Cooking, Knitting, Scrapbooking, Gardening, Style, Weddings, Kids, Family, LIFE!

Right about then, as it so often does, the Universe kicked me right in the ass. A whole bunch of times.

I read quite a few blogs about blogging, because I take my business seriously (not that we’re ever serious around here), and because I want to make this blog the best experience possible for my readers.

In a single week, everything being published on these meta blogs was about finding your “thing,” your message. What makes you really different? What makes you, YOU?

I knew who I was, and what I was trying to do here, but then something happened. My eyes fell upon the stack of Martha Stewart Living magazines on my coffee table.

Have you ever had an epiphany? An epiphany so hard you feel like you got the wind knocked out of you?

I have been obsessed with Martha Stewart and everything she does, just about forever. It is only more recently that I have had the balls to admit it.

Because Martha’s all about homemaking! Homemaker. Stay-at-home-mom. I shudder at the words. Not that there’s anything in the world wrong with that, but it is emphatically NOT ME.

I have blue hair! I have an alter ego who goes by Brent on my super queer days! I WILL NOT BE DOMESTICATED!

But now I see. Those two sides of myself – the homespun domestic side and the wild rebel side – they can coexist.

They will coexist, because I know I’m not the only one who struggles with this, these two opposing personalities and sets of interests. I don’t think we’re even as small a minority as we believe we are. WE’RE EVERYWHERE.

This blog is a rainbow of the strange, creepy, offbeat, indie, DIY lifestyle, neatly categorized by topic and season, as things should be.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – consider this your personal guide to growing up, living weird and living well.

Leave Me to My Projects is now a closed site. While it is no longer being written or serviced, all projects are and will continue to be available.